"What carving?"
She felt that Larry was studying her in the dark, and she pulled her robe a little closer around her... not a gesture of modesty, because she felt no threat from this man, but one of nervousness.
"Just his initials," Larry said casually. "H.E.L. If that had been the end of it, I wouldn't be here now. But then at the motorcycle dealership in Wells - "
"We were there!"
"I know you were. I saw a couple of bikes gone. What made an even bigger impression was that Harold had siphoned some gas from the underground tank. You must have helped him, Fran. I damn near lost my fingers."
"No, I didn't have to. Harold hunted around until he found something he called a plug-vent - "
Larry groaned and slapped his forehead. "Plug-vent! Jesus! I never even looked for where they were venting the tank! You mean he just hunted around... pulled a plug... and put his hose in?"
"Well... yes."
"Oh, Harold," Larry said in a tone of admiration that she had never heard before, at least not in connection with Harold Lauder's name. "Well, that's one of his tricks I missed. Anyway, we got to Stovington. And Nadine was so upset she fainted."
"I cried," Fran said. "I bawled until it seemed I'd never stop. I just had my mind made up that when we got there, someone would welcome us in and say, 'Hi! Step inside, delousing on the right, cafeteria's on your left.'" She shook her head. "That seems so silly now."
"I was not dismayed. Dauntless Harold had been there before me, left his sign, and gone on. I felt like a tenderfoot Easterner following that Indian from The Pathfinder."
His view of Harold both fascinated and amazed her. Hadn't Stu really been leading the party by the time they left Vermont and struck out for Nebraska? She couldn't honestly remember. By then they had all been preoccupied with the dreams. Larry was reminding her of things she had forgotten... or worse, taken for granted. Harold risking his life to put that sign on the barn - it had seemed like a foolish risk to her, but it had done some good after all. And getting gas from that underground tank... it had apparently been a major operation for Larry, but Harold had seemed to take it purely as a matter of course. It made her feel small and made her feel guilty. They all more or less assumed that Harold was nothing but a grinning supernumerary. But Harold had turned quite a few tricks in the last six weeks. Had she been so much in love with Stu that it took this total stranger to point out some home truths about Harold? What made the feeling even more uncomfortable was the fact that, once he had gotten his feet under him, Harold had been completely adult about herself and Stuart.
Larry said, "So here's another neat sign, complete with route numbers, at Stovington, right? And fluttering in the grass next to it, another Payday candy wrapper. I felt like instead of following broken sticks and bent grasses, I was following Harold's trail of chocolate Paydays. Well, we didn't follow your route the whole way. We bent north near Gary, Indiana, because there was one hell of a fire, still burning in places. It looked like every damn oiltank in the city went up. Anyhow, we picked up the Judge on the detour, stopped by Hemingford Home - we knew she was gone by then, the dreams you know, but we all wanted to see that place just the same. The corn... the tire-swing... you know what I mean?"
"Yes," Frannie said quietly. "Yes, I do."
"And all the time I'm going crazy, thinking that something is going to happen, we're going to get attacked by a motorcycle gang or something, run out of water, I don't know.
"There used to be a book my mom had, she got it from her grandmother or something. In His Steps, that was the name of it. And there were all these little stories about guys with horrible problems. Ethical problems, most of them. And the guy who wrote the book said that to solve the problems, all you had to do was ask, 'What would Jesus do?' It always cleared the trouble right up. You know what I think? It's a Zen question, not really a question at all but a way to clear your mind, like saying Om and looking at the tip of your nose."
Fran smiled. She knew what her mother would have said about something like that.
"So when I really started to get wound up, Lucy - that's my girl, did I tell you? - Lucy would say, 'Hurry up, Larry, ask the question.'"
"What would Jesus do?" Fran said, amused.